He crashed back into himself and felt the Easter evening damp. Dolls
and chains hung in ritual fashion from the branches surrounding him,
and through the knife-hacked oak trees he could make out great luminous
spires and domes, and older, grim, but luxuriant blocks of apartments
sealed with steel-plate louvers as if against attack. Beside these rose
skeletal scaffoldings on which, judging from the hives of lights, whole
families perched on open-air platforms while resourceful or desperate
individuals dangled in slings and sacks suspended from guy wires.

Across the sky, as though projected from behind the sulfur-tinged
clouds, flashed pictograms and iridescent banks of hypertext. The word
vitessa was repeated often . . . and slogans like efram-zev . . . the
right mood at the right time. He felt hypnotized by the messages,
information raining down like some new kind of radiation. Then there
were streams of news images and giant flickering headlines . . .
al-waqi‘a still a threat . . . voyancy links now halfprice . . .

He’d been standing there for a long time, he thought, having woken
suddenly by the fountain, amazed to find that his hair was long and so
blond it almost seemed to glow in the dark. It reminded him of a
childhood story but he couldn’t pin it down. Then he realized that of
much greater concern was that he couldn’t remember where he was. It was
a park of some kind, a vast shadowy garden in some siren-filled city.
But which one?

He heard a voice . . . garbled and yet unnaturally clear, seeming to
come from inside his head. I’ll take
Manhattan. It was a man’s voice, both far away and far too
close.

What did that mean . . . to take Manhattan?
He tried to shake himself out of his haze. Something terrible had
happened. Drugs, head injury. “I don’t remember my name!” he said
aloud, and felt his heart pound at the implication. Even his clothes
seemed strange . . . navy cotton drawstring pants, Guatemalan slip-ons,
a T-shirt that said i’ve been to wall drug, and a cream-colored
windbreaker with a logo on the chest that showed a wheelbarrow with
flames rising out of it. Judging from the grime and odor he might have
been sleeping in the bushes for several nights. But Manhattan meant New
York, that much he did think was right. Was that where he was? All he
could bring to mind was waking with a start with some intuition of
danger. Then he heard what he couldn’t decide was the same voice or
another and glanced around frantically. It said, For I came down from heaven, not to do
mine will, but the will of him who sent me.

Shit, he thought. I’m hallucinating. Then a sudden deep sense of
alarm brought his whole being alive. There was another sound in the
outer darkness. Someone or something was approaching. Seeking him out. Clip clop came the echoes that his
hyperanxious ears filtered out . . . from the tunnel. He hid behind the
bushes behind the fountain. His vision seemed to blur and his head
filled with static. He waited, muscles cramping.

Out of the black maw they emerged at last, one on a large chestnut
horse, the other on a bay. The horses were shielded with synthetic face
and chest plates, while the riders wore old-fashioned NYPD uniforms.
When the figures stopped, he could see that they didn’t have faces.
Just flat sheets with scanner slits. Up close, in the sodium lights,
the scan masks were scraped and cloudy. From the south came bursts of
gunfire and thudding low-frequency music, but here it was quiet enough
to hear their echolocation sonar. His heart bounced as he smelled the
tense, strangely sweet animal scent of the horses. At last a flare of
static passed between the two mounted shapes. Then, just as they’d
appeared, they moved on, the horses’ hooves striking the asphalt with a
timeless Roman rhythm, their imposing silhouettes fading into the
trees.

The moment they were past, from behind one of the spray painted
boulders, a figure wrapped in matte-black cable tape wearing an NV
helmet leapt out. “Yer ass is lucky,” the shadow said, grabbing one of
his hands in a neoprene fighting glove -- weaving through a labyrinth
of stripped cars and barbed-wire effigies. They looked like origami
contrasted with the turrets rising above the park, armorguard facets
gleaming like reptilian crystals. “Hurry,” his guide called out. “Meter
says you gonna have a meltdown.”

The darkness became a membrane of endlessly falling slow motion
snow, only the flakes were like glass faces, painfully intricate but
beautiful to behold. “This way!” the figure called, and it was like
stepping through a wall of cool white light. Suddenly, all around were
people. He felt a dart of warmth hit his arm. Then he fell, and he
seemed to keep falling, or rising, as if he’d been taken up inside a
whirlwind, faces and disintegrated memories orbiting around him. A whirlwind, he remembered. I came here by whirlwind.

When at last the spinning stopped, the bodies and the faces had
stabilized, and standing over him was a large black woman who, as his
eyes began to focus, he came to see was in fact a man, wearing makeup,
an aqua wig, and a long African-style robe over sheepskin boots from
which a Beretta Cheetah was just visible.

“We’ve given you some ZENO,” the vision informed him. “Try not to
move fast.”

He was lying in a tent on an old cot. Candles glowed. Through a
gelpane window he could see people passing between radomes and tepees.
He heard an accordion and smelled marsala. Sparks rose from oil drums.

“Yo,” a voice behind him said, and he saw it was the tape-mailed
figure who’d found him minus the night-vision helmet -- a Puerto Rican
girl of about sixteen with a pigskin face graft that suggested a dark
market burn ward.

“Who are you?” the large black woman/man asked.

He tried to focus. He couldn’t get over his long blond hair. There
wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and yet for all the hardness of muscle,
his skin was smooth. Except for the terrible burning he felt now on his
back. That’s what made me black out, he realized. Pain. Pain from the
skin of my back. There was something there but he couldn’t bring
himself to think of it. Voices rustled in his brain . . . Last hope . . . Psyche War . . . beneath the
sadness of a blues guitar drifting in on the night wind from somewhere
far away -- or deeper inside himself.

“Do you know who you are?” the large black woman/man repeated, but
he couldn’t answer. Who were these people and what did they want? Where
had he been going when he fell out of the whirlwind?

To meet someone, he thought. To find someone. There's
somewhere I have to be. There’s
someone I have to be.

“That’s all right,” the dark-skinned giant said. “Let’s start with
where you are. You’re in New York City. In a part of Central Park that
no one but us knows exists. We call it Fort Thoreau. It’s a kind of
sanctuary. We refer to ourselves as the Satyagrahi, and I’m Aretha
Nightingale.”

So saying, the speaker brought over a psykter of purified water and
poured a cup for him, carefully considering the man’s white blond hair
and tomorrow-staring eyes. There was something intriguingly familiar
and at the same time deeply foreign about this night visitor. He was of
average height and certainly less than average weight, but he radiated
a presence that filled the tent.

The man drank some water and said, “You’re a--”

“A drag queen? That’s right, honey, I am!”

In fact the speaker looked like a former linebacker trying very hard
to imitate some forgotten disco singer like Donna Summer.

“Used to be a lawyer. Lead counsel for the largest insurance company
in the world. Lived a few blocks away. Of course I had to keep my
private life secret. Then one day I saw I had to get out of the limo
and back behind the mule. But that’s another story. That’s my story.
Tinkerbell says the Securitors let you skiddo.”

“Who’s Tinkerbell?’

“Me.” The PR girl winked, laser-edging a frozen-forged Gerber blade.

“Is someone after you?” Aretha asked, noticing again how long and
blond the odd man’s hair was, how outwardly strained and yet internally
resilient he appeared.

“I don’t know . . . I can’t . . .”

Aretha picked up a detector and ran it over him. The device recorded
an electromagnetic disturbance of an unknown kind.

“So do you have any idea
who you are?”

“N-no. I . . . don’t . . . ,” the man said, staring around at
the walls of the tent, which he saw through the gloom were decorated
with chintzy Chinese fans, kimonos, and ostrich feathers.

“And you don’t know how you got here?” Aretha prodded.

The blond man thought for a minute. Beyond the crazy idea of falling
out of a whirlwind all he remembered was staring at the syringes in the
fountain and then being seized with a scorching pain across his back.
“No,” he said finally. “I only remember the things on horses.”

“We’re going to give you a bioscan,” Aretha announced. “The
psychometer that Tink had shorted out on you. You had a brainwave
reading that we’ve never seen before. Makes Saint Anthony’s Syndrome
and Pandora withdrawal look like an attack of the jitters. Is there
anything else that comes to mind . . . right this minute?”